


Accordance

by brigantines



Category: Kingdom Hearts, Wild Road - Gabriel King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 12:17:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17622230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigantines/pseuds/brigantines
Summary: The Keyblade Master asks the mage to teach him magic.  KH1, sort of a weird fusion with the Wild Road novels by Gabriel King.  Ancient abandoned WIP from the dusty sands of time.





	Accordance

**Author's Note:**

> look at this fucken fossil from 2006. repostin' from livejournal for archival purposes.

“Teach me magic,” the boy says, blue eyes bright and terrible in their earnestness. He is too old to still have eyes like that, and far too young to understand what he’s asking. For all his strengths, for all his good-natured altruism and his lofty notions about justice and disconcerting enthusiasm for this hero business, the legendary Keyblade Master is still just a child.

“No,” the mage answers shortly for what feels like the thousandth time. He is out of patience and intermediaries to soften his opinions about the child and the child’s persistence over certain subjects. Magic is not for kids who treat their mission as a grand adventure and their battles as a game, spinning the shiny gold key like a character in an RPG when he’s done cutting through darkness. The boy is strong, granted, and undeniably motivated, but in all the wrong directions. The knight says he just needs a little patience. A little time to smooth out his flightiness. The knight is better at dealing with the boy (probably because the knight has a kid of his own, while the mage merely has nephews that can only be endured in small doses), and the mage would prefer that that arrangement stay exactly how it was. Let someone who was used to dealing with thousands of annoying questions and inane requests per day do the babysitting.

The knight gives him a Look whenever the mage mentions this out loud. The mage knows it bothers the knight to see his impatience towards the boy, but he can hardly help it. If the boy wasn’t the crucial element to their mission, the mage would’ve happily left him behind long ago and saved himself some stress and bouts of killing fury.

Oh, but he’s crucial, that child. He’s so crucial the mage can’t stand it. Crucial should have been a strong, powerful warrior, the chosen of the Kingdom, not an untrained, untried brat from a backwater planet.

The knight keeps telling him that he shouldn’t be too critical of the boy and that they don’t have to worry about him anyway. Whatever else the boy is or isn’t, he is exactly what they’ve been sent to find, he has to be, because their King knows what he’s talking about and the Keyblade doesn’t choose wrongly, and there is no question that the boy is the Keyblade’s chosen one. He can’t be anything but the key they’ve been searching for. He can’t be anything but destiny incarnate.

That may be so, but the mage shares Leon’s dubious opinion on it. The Keyblade does not choose wrongly, but surely it was getting desperate.

“Come on,” the boy wheedles, holding out his arms. He wheedles. He might be asking for candy, or the next turn at the game controller. 

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“It’s my reason.”

“You won’t teach me magic, you won’t let me pilot the ship…didn’t your King tell you guys to help me out?”

The mage flicks a few switches on the ship console from the captain chair just to rub it in. A few weeks earlier he might have smirked while doing so but he doesn’t bother now. It’s not worth it, and it’s also not worth it to even look up and meet the boy’s inevitable pout. This ship is entirely too small to contain a self proclaimed hero’s childish defiance and the mage’s own fraying temper without steel doors or the knight between them. “He didn’t tell us to jump when you say.”

“Geez.” The boy stalks off, clomping his oversize shoes as loudly as he can to announce his infantile irritation at being denied his every whim to the rest of the uncaring universe, which at the moment consists of a world skipping closet made out of gummi blocks and a sleeping knight and the vastness of space. Oh, and a seething duck.

Said duck nobly resists the urge to fry the boy crispy on his way out.

Teach him magic. Teach his coarse, clumsy, sun tanned hands how to weave energy, teach his flighty little mind to coax and command the forces that knit the fabric of the universe together. Magic is subtlety and precision, leashed destruction and the kind of meticulous discipline that can call fire by chaining together individual atoms one by one. It takes years of study. Magic is the opposite of physical strength and of simple. The boy thinks being a warrior entails hitting things with a large blunt object, and has less than any idea about what being a soldier entails. Discipline comes about as naturally to him as it would to a puppy.

A few buttons are stabbed with more force than strictly necessary and the unfolding cosmos is glared at through the cockpit’s windows. Bloody stars. So many bloody stars overrun with darkness and they have to visit each, have to waste their time searching all of them one by one and they can’t even ‘accidentally’ leave the brat behind on one.

The mage knows himself well enough to admit that some of his frustrations are not the boy’s specific doing. A lot of it is natural anxiety, the result of the King’s disappearance, and uncertainty over the future of the Kingdom, and the fact that they’re all crammed together on this tiny bucket with only blocks of gummi between them and instant death by vacuum, and the fact that once they land there’ll be nothing between them and instant death by Heartless except their own skills, and worry over whether the kid will be able to hold his own when the mage or the knight aren’t watching his back, and worry over whether the kid will be able to watch their backs in return, and the knight’s irritating acceptance of the whole situation when he really ought to be sharing some of the mage’s concerns. They’re following a child into battle and they don’t dare lose him because of the Keyblade and their orders and their mission that supposedly depends on him, and all the kid has been doing is making their mission more difficult. He’s an unwanted, oh so very necessary, very crucial complication. 

The mage respects his King and loves him like a brother, misses him fiercely when he’s gone and would do anything for him, but at the moment there’s only one thing that’s going to happen at their reunion and it will involve a nice right hook across the jaw for saddling them with an intractable brat. 

The Keyblade Master is still sulking when they hit planetside. The mage pretends not to notice the extra viciousness in the glittering arc of the Keyblade’s swings and the resentful glances being cast his way. The boy’s temper is good for one thing after all; he can clear Heartless faster than a high level spell when he’s feeling belligerent and under appreciated. Which, to his mind, is a large percentage of the time.

The knight doesn’t even have to ask if they’ve been arguing again. Arguing is their default state, interspersed with rare moments of cooperation due to necessity. They make only the barest effort to coordinate on the battlefield despite the fact that their lives often depend on it. The boy goes out of his way to waste potions rather than requiring curative magic when he needs the boost and the mage lets him, because the boy is the one taking the time to stock their purses with coin enough to buy as many potions as his willful little heart desires. The mage won’t lift a finger to handle an enemy that’s charging the boy (usually, although concern for the mission will occasionally override lack of concern for the boy’s welfare) and that’s exactly how the boy wants it, given his indignant squalling about interference otherwise. They fight in the same localized space but they don’t fight together. Theirs is an Arrangement and the knight can dislike it all he wants, can disapprove of their bickering and wax eloquent about how much easier everything would be if they would try to get along. 

The mage is trying. Not breaking his back for it, of course, but for the sake of the mission he’s letting as much as he can slide, and it’s still not enough. There’s always one more thing to spark their arguments, one more thing to incite their wills to clash.

The Keyblade Master wants to pilot the gummi ship. The Keyblade Master wants to investigate this world rather than that one. The Keyblade Master wants someone to teach him combat level magics. The Keyblade Master wants to get involved with world specific incidents that fly right in the face of every non-interference policy existing. The Keyblade Master wants to be the leader of their mismatched trio and make all the decisions. The Keyblade Master refuses to even consider the possibility that the girl he’s searching for and the other friends from his home and even his home itself might just be gone, because that’s exactly what’s happened to who knew how many people from other worlds and even the chosen of the Kingdom isn’t that damn special that he should expect to be the sole exception.

The Keyblade Master thinks this is a field trip rather than a war.

“Are you even paying attention?!” the mage has to yell at him time and time again, although it sounds more like a squawk. 

The boy just ignores him or rolls his eyes or gives him that cocky ‘what do you know, duck’ smirk or turns away, and sometimes sticks his tongue when he thinks the mage isn’t looking. 

It’s on days like those that the mage considers, with an alarming amount of seriousness, just how hard it would be for the boy to get used to wielding the Keyblade one handed. Surely a legendary genius fighter of destiny, or whatever crap the myths spewed about the Keyblade’s chosen, would be able to figure it out. He didn’t really need both of those arms.

On the days that the boy actively challenges him, the mage considers how well the boy would be able to function without a head. It can’t be all that much different from the norm.

The knight watches them patiently. Where another might have pointed and laughed he simply smiles good naturedly, where another might have thrown their hands up in disgust he waits for the bickering duo to come to some sort of half ass truce so they can get their job done. Where another might have pounded their heads against the nearest wall, he remembers what it’s like to raise an infant and finds the grace to endure and accept. Each time they both claim it’s the other’s fault. The boy rushes ahead recklessly. The mage hangs back and wastes time. The boy blows their disguises. The mage wastes energy on disguises that could be better spent in battle. The boy can’t read maps. The mage isn’t tall enough to read signposts. Chocolate. Vanilla. Hamburgers. Hotdogs. Ta-may-toe ta-mah-toe.

“Teach me magic.” 

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re breathing my air. Now go away.”

“But—”

“No.”

 

 

 

***********

 

 

 

The Traverse Town posse don’t know quite what to make of him when he comes to visit, this boy that is supposed to be the galaxy’s savior. Their savior. The vessel of all the Kingdom’s hopes and the key to their survival, according to the King.

Aerith smiles at him because Aerith smiles at everyone, and the boy doesn’t see the way her gaze lingers on his back, wondering. Measuring. She knows it isn’t fair to school her face into a pleasant expression and listen to him talk about his adventures while coolly weighing his health, his muscles, his soundness; judging how soon he might recover from an injury and how he can conduct himself in a life threatening battle he’s going to fight on their behalf. She knows it isn’t right when Leon all but kills him bringing him in the first time (and the second time, and the third time, when every return to Traverse Town equals the boy challenging Leon to Yet Another Rematch that the boy never wins but his ego won’t let him give up), but she says nothing. She can’t help herself. None of them can. They’ve been waiting so long for this. They’ve waited years for this child to be born and grow up and come to them as a savior, and now that he’s here they are being faced with the reality that maybe they should have waited a little longer.

The boy calls Aerith ma’am for the longest time. He blushes when she smiles and stumbles over his words in his haste to apologize for things that aren’t his fault. She wishes he wouldn’t. She doesn’t want to send a polite stranger out to die.

Cid growls and chews his cigar even more resentfully than usual. “He don’t look much like destiny,” is the pilot’s terse observation. “But what the hell do we know? If he’s it, he’s it.”

Aerith says he has to be. Like the knight, she trusts the King implicitly and the fact that the boy carries the Keyblade has to prove something, doesn’t it?

Yuffie nods emphatically.

“He’s something special, my ninja senses can tell.” She swats Cid for the face she’s knows he’s making behind her back. “He’s what we’ve been waiting for. He will be. I’m sure of it.” 

The boy gets along best with Yuffie, to the surprise of no one. She’s closest to his age and closest to his mentality (he would die of mortification before ever admitting this, of course), and they’re an oddly suited pair, with her shit eating grin and his complete inability to tell lies with a straight face and both of them blaming the other for whatever mischief they’ve managed to get into. They’re a terror to both Heartless and humans denizens of Traverse Town. Yuffie teases him because Yuffie teases everyone, and the boy doesn’t notice that she doesn’t pull the kind of pranks on him that she pulls on the others, that her including him in her hellraising amounts to a demented sort of respect from the pathological klepto ninja girl. 

Cid has about the same tolerance for the boy that he does for moogles and ninjas. Zero when they’re making nuisances of themselves, which to his mind is most of the time. He bitches about the state of their gummi ship and the complete lack of progress he’s been noticing in their respective quests and geezus, how the hell were they supposed to put their faith in a kid, a duck, and a dog. He’s so antagonistic it’s actually easy to ignore him, because it takes only a short time to figure out that this is simply how Cid acts with everyone. The boy steps a little more carefully around Cid than the others, mostly out of fear of the pilot’s dangerous wagging cigar, but most of Cid’s insults and the complaints go in one ear and right out the other.

Leon, however, is another matter. The boy hasn’t forgiven the scarred man for the events of their first meeting and, given his instinctive bristling defensiveness whenever someone brings it up, likely never will. If the fight is mentioned he mumbles a different excuse every time and then falls suspiciously, leashed-explosion silent, and half a second later will have come up with the lamest excuse to revisit Traverse Town.

I’ll win this time for sure, he says, running a hand over the Keyblade’s length in bloody minded anticipation before smacking it firmly into his gloved palm. I’ll get him back. Just you watch.

He never does. It’s like a running gag to the King’s men and the Traverse Town posse. Leon, after enough wheedling to drive any person to the end of their sanity, will grudgingly agree to some kind of ‘sparring match’ and then, about two seconds in, knock the boy flat with the gunblade and stride off without a word or a backward glance. The boy pounds the cobblestoned street with his fist. The boy glares at the line of Leon’s iron straight back and his flat, uncompromising gaze and seethes with frustration. It’s a little bit more complicated than rivalry and ego. It’s a test of the Keyblade Master’s worthiness, and the boy knows that he fails it in Leon’s cold eyes every time they come back to Traverse Town. The boy knows that Leon believes the Keyblade might have been better off in other hands, and can’t stand that knowledge.

So he’s a little sideways around Leon, some of it being the belligerent male ego trying to challenge a perceived rival and some of it being the child in awe of the fighter he’s always dreamed of becoming himself someday and the rest of it being a desire to prove himself to the only one who matters, the fellow fighter. The come-before hero. Nevermind that Leon would be the first to announce that he isn’t and never had been any kind of hero. He scowls at the boy’s attempts to get his attention, is barely civil in their grudging conversations, openly doubts the boy’s capability with the Keyblade, unmercifully pounds the boy into the street in their matches and never seems to feel the slightest amount of guilt about it, and the boy just keeps coming back for more.

“Masochist,” Leon mutters as the boy peels himself off the street and stumbles painfully over to shove a laughing Yuffie and endure a potion from the knight. “He doesn’t know when to give up.”

“He likes you.” Aerith’s hand lingers on the scarred man’s arm, green healing light sinking into a torn muscle. The Keyblade was still a formidable weapon even in untrained hands, and packed quite the punch whenever the boy managed to land a hit. 

Leon flinches from the sting of the injury or the observation (or both) and grounds out a terse denial. He misses Aerith rolling her eyes. The mage, strolling over to see the aftermath, does not.

“Settled any burning questions about authenticity yet?” he inquires. Aerith shoots him a Look and Leon winces again at her hand suddenly clenching his wounded arm.

“Of course not,” she says, poisonously sweet. “There wasn’t any question to begin with, now was there?” 

“If you say so, miss Gainsborough.”

“I do, Mister Royal Court Wizard.”

Leon tactfully withholds his opinion on the subject, knowing Aerith would be the first to jump on him and the mage wouldn’t lift a feather to stop the rant, even if he privately agreed with Leon. As Cid said, who could tell what form destiny might take. All they have for a clue is the key and the King’s words, and for Aerith and Yuffie that might well be enough. Leon isn’t so sure. The others are not soldiers, and while Leon knows the value of faith and ideals and what kind of acts ‘destiny’ can inspire, his trained eyes look past the Keyblade to a child who smiles too brightly and laughs too easily and gets far too caught up in this rivalry with a stranger which (as Yuffie never fails to maliciously remind him) is starting to scarily resemble puppy love. 

Still, he has to grudgingly admit, it’s better than no hope at all. And for all the boy’s immature tendencies he’s certainly no slouch with his weapon.

“Do you think he’s the real thing?” Leon questions the mage while the boy is out with Yuffie terrorizing the town/demolishing its Heartless population and Aerith is …somewhere else. Anywhere else. “He’s been out in space with you now for …”

“You’ve fought with him.” The mage doesn’t want to answer this question, doesn’t want to speculate about things that could make or break this fragile beacon of hope they’ve found by luck or fate or cruel irony. Telling dismal tales about the boy’s performance isn’t going to help anything. “Can’t you warrior types instinctively sense things about each other when you duel, or something?” 

“Only if they’re the type that expounds their dramatic history during the duel.” Leon eyebrows at him. “Can’t you magic types sense great destinies?”

“Only if they’re wearing the ‘great destiny +1’ T-shirt.” The mage flips his wand, annoyed. “He’s a brat, I can tell you that.”

“Your partner said you might say that.” 

“You think my perspective’s skewed because I don’t get along with kids? I get along fine with kids, as long as they’re kept at least a room away. I wouldn’t care how old he is if he could do the job.” 

Leon’s expression darkens. “You think he can’t.”

The mage shrugs. “Who can tell? He’s got the blasted key. He’s got the key and it obeys him, and he fell out of the sky and in with us awfully conveniently. I’m not an expert on great destinies and the people meant to fulfill them. You should ask Merlin about it, when he returns, I suppose.” Pause, a thought striking. “Merlin…is returning, right? Queen Minnie mentioned that the King had been in correspondence with him…”

“He’s coming back,” Leon assures. “He does this all the time. We’re just as anxious for him to return as you are.”

“I doubt that.” The Traverse Town posse wants to ask Merlin his opinions on the Keyblade and the Keyblade’s apparent chosen; the mage wants to ask Merlin where the hell their King was and what was going on with the Heartless and how they ought to handle it and if the infamous enchantress Maleficent was really still alive and active as the rumors said she was and if the mage could possibly borrow a few tomes of magic and for an autograph or five and then, maybe, if he remembered, about a spiky haired brat and his oversized magic key.

Leon pinches the bridge of his nose, a familiar habit when he was stressed or headaching or about to take someone’s arm off with his gunblade. “Merlin may not be able to tell us anything, of course. ‘Destiny isn’t a thing to be predicted and measured’ is just the sort of thing he would say.”

The unfinished end of that statement was ‘just to piss me off.’

“Isn’t it annoying how cryptic these magic types can be?” the mage asks blandly.

“We’re putting all our trust in that kid.” 

“He knows.”

Leon has the good grace to look a little guilty at that. “If he were older …” 

The mage casually fries a Heartless shadow that had been creeping up behind the scarred man. “If he were older, he might be asking these kinds of questions too. Perhaps we’re lucky he’s the way he is.”

The boy of course chose that moment to go streaking over the rooftop above them, squalling like a wet cat and conspicuously not wearing pants. He was chasing after a familiar blur of ninja girl waving something red.

“…or maybe not.”

 

 

***********

 

 

The boy is standing at the port window in the gummi ship, fingers pressed to the glass and so close he’s fogging it with every faint exhalation. His expression is a perfect blank, but his eyes give away what he’s thinking as if he’d been shouting it. 

He has no idea what he looks like, reflected against the starry black.

A world searched. Two worlds. Three. No King, no lost friends. Nothing but Heartless and more riddles, more mysteries to taunt them, and the boy is all but choking on the unaccustomed taste of despair. He’s only now begun to realize what is to have to search an entire galaxy for something you’ve lost.

“Say something to him, why don’t you.”

In the cockpit, the mage eases the ship into a gentle roll, eyes fixed on the monitor readings. “I don’t have anything to tell him that he doesn’t already know.”

The knight frowns faintly. “But wouldn’t you want to hear someone encourage you not to give up hope?”

“If he needs us to tell him that, he’ll never find those friends of his.”

The boy’s fist impacts the reinforced window. “I can’t give up,” he mutters, reflection gritting its teeth. “I won’t.”

“He’s got to believe it himself,” says the mage.

They search another world to no avail. The boy might be getting a little desperate, because for once he stays close to his companions and doesn’t mouth off and simply concentrates on searching, lips pressed into an unhappy line as location after location turns into a dead end. There’s nothing here but shadows. 

He destroys them mechanically, attacks economic rather than enthusiastic, all his energy controlled and trained on getting to the next area. To see if anyone was waiting for him around the corner.

He doesn’t take the consistent disappointments well.

“Is this what it’s going to be like?!” he bursts out, as the mage readies the ship for take-off. “We just look and look and look and never find anything?”

“If you haven’t noticed, it’s a large galaxy,” the mage replies tartly. “We search in a grid pattern, one world at a time, and check in with the guys at Traverse Town at intervals. You think it would be any better to just dash off to haphazard worlds and hope we get lucky?”

“We’re dashing off to organized worlds and hoping we get lucky right now,” the boy mutters miserably, folding his clumsy limbs into the co-pilot’s chair. He stares morosely out the main viewport.

The mage resists the urge to tell him to grow up. It’s a valid concern, that they’ll have missed the King even if they methodically search every world; it’s just annoying to hear the mage’s own fears coming out of the brat’s mouth. 

“It doesn’t matter,” the mage says brusquely. “Goofy and I, we’ll just keep looking until we find him. Looking is the only thing we can do at this point, so that’s what we’re going to do. There’s no point in getting worked up.”

“Who’s getting worked up?” Defensive bluster, as if the boy hadn’t come to him with fear behind his expression and pleading behind his words. The boy wanted someone to tell him that it was all going to work out. He wanted someone to say that everything would be okay, they’d find their friends and discover the secrets of the Heartless and defeat them and all the worlds would be restored and everything would be happy and shiny again. A child’s desire. A child’s belief in no consequences, that the adults had a plan for Handling This because adults had plans for handling everything (it was what made them adults), that they would somehow be able to make everything better. 

Well the mage didn’t have a plan and the knight didn’t have a plan and their allies didn’t have a plan; they were all putting their faith in the King’s plan and in a magic key and a boy that fell out of the sky as much as said boy was putting his faith in them that they would tell him where to go and what to do. They were all of them flying blind and against the wind.

And the person that was supposed to be their destined savior wanted reassurance.

“If you’re not going to have any confidence in the search, you’ll never find your buddies,” the mage informs the boy harshly, accent thick with scorn. “You may as well just give up. Maybe if you mope in one place long enough they’ll eventually come find you.”

There’s a brief stunned look, the boy not expecting an attack when he’d come like a kicked puppy looking for sympathy. It’s almost comical how quickly he flashes from depression to anger in response. “I’m not giving up,” he snarls, half-rising and one hand even extending to summon the Keyblade as if he could physically smash the doubt that had been raised. “I’ll never give up on them. I’ll find Kairi and Riku no matter what.”

“Oh good. I’m sure they’d be happy to know that you were still interested in finding them rather than whining about how hard it’ll be.”

The boy glares. The mage glares back. The boy flings himself out of the chair and stalks out of the cockpit. The mage finishes the start-up sequence, muttering. They don’t speak to each other until three worlds later, after the knight takes the boy aside for a few talks about faith and unspoken concerns and trigger buttons and how not pushing them made life easier for everyone. 

The boy just gives him a blank look, and the knight sighs. “It isn’t possible for you two to get along?”

“He starts it,” the boy mutters. “He always starts it. He just can’t get off my case.”

“Aww, he’s just worried about the mission…”

“That’s the only thing he cares about, the stupid mission!” the boy yells. “What about my friends? What about my home? What about all the things your King said about the Keyblade? How am I supposed to save anyone with a stupid magic weapon if he won’t teach me how to use magic? What about---” He stops, breathing too fast.

The knight just looks at him sympathetically. The boy’s shoulders jerk, his gaze falling to the floor and all that mess of hair acting as a shield. Anything but to have to face the knight’s compassion.

“I…I’m sorry— ” he starts.

“Gonna cry?” the mage inquires from the doorway, leaning against it.

The boy’s head jerks up. His death glare is somewhat marred by the overbright shine in blue eyes. 

“No,” he snarls. 

“Cos if you are, take it outside so I don’t have to listen. Some of us are trying to do our jobs around here.”

“Fine.” The Keyblade flares to life in the boy’s clenched fist. “I’ll be outside doing my job. That’s what I’m here for, right? That’s all you need me for.”

“No,” the mage says candidly. “That’s not what I need you for. That’s what everyone needs you for. Aerith, Yuffie, Cid, Leon, your friends and your parents and everyone at our castle and on all the worlds—that’s what they need you for.”

The boy has no good answer for that, his anger brought up short like a dog that’s run the length of its chain and is jerked off its feet at the end. He just stands there, fists clenching and unclenching uselessly, trying and failing to come up with some way to deny what the mage had said. 

The mage waits, but the boy has had enough. He’s too close to tears for any kind of final retort so he just turns tail and runs, and the mage lets him. 

For the next two days the only thing the boy does is slaughter Heartless like a soul possessed. Without complaint, without hesitation, without anything save for pure, blind fury. 

The mage accepts this sudden bloodthirsty dedication without comment, at least until he notices the knight giving him a Look.

“What?”

“You’re doing this on purpose,” the knight accuses, long face pulled into a frown.

“We don’t have time to babysit. Either he learns how to handle himself or he’ll stay a brat. Dead weight. We can’t afford dead weight.”

“Upsetting him deliberately isn’t going to make him stronger.”

The mage doesn’t have to say it. The sound of the boy taking out his rage on a Heartless that would’ve otherwise required all three of them attacking to bring it down is answer enough. The Heartless shakes the ground when it falls and fades away to reveal the boy, panting and sweat streaked but nowhere near his limit. He glares deliberately at the mage before launching himself at the next target.

The knight is still frowning.

“This mission is bigger than him and more important than his personal feelings,” the mage reminds his partner. “He’s got to learn that. If he has to hate something, he might as well be productive about it.”

“He’ll hate you.”

The mage hesitates for the barest second, but then shrugs it off. “He’ll get over it eventually.”

The knight isn’t so sure. He watches them both with unconcealed concern, wondering how far the mage’s ruthless efficiency will push the boy before he snaps and pushes back, but as it turns out he needn’t have worried. The boy doesn’t have it in him to hate. He can be surly and selfish and ill tempered but it passes; he’s too much of a good-natured child to be anything but fleeting and childish in his resentment. He’s back to his old self in no time at all, detouring needlessly while planetside and getting into unnecessary trouble whenever possible and arguing with the mage. They glare at each other and test each other’s limits and generally squabble whenever the slightest opportunity presents itself. The boy pesters the mage to teach him magic and the mage refuses. The mage pesters the boy to be more responsible (by the mage’s definition of the word, anyway) and the boy lashes out. Their compulsion to squabble is apparently pathological, and makes the knight wish for the uncomplicated trials of raising an infant. He worries mildly over a sudden bout of deafness that breaks out on one of the worlds; both of his companions talking through him to each but somehow unable to hear his or each other’s replies. 

“We’re staying here for the night.”

“We’re going exploring.”

“I said we’re staying here.”

“I said we’re moving on.”

“Come on, Goofy.”

“Come on, Goofy.”

They glare daggers at each other, and the knight wishes he’d thought to bring a book. Or at least headphones.

One would think that fighting next to each other, saving each other’s hides time and time again, scraping by on what meager income they have next to each other, and seeing new sights and braving dangers next to each other would instill some kind of status quo. An equilibrium. An unspoken I do this and you do that, and we all step around each other and it works fine. One would think that after all this time, there’d be some vague, pathetic iota of teamwork involving in their interactions.

Maybe some other mage and some other Keyblade Master. Mastering the arcane arts requires tenacity of the highest degree, and only the King knew what sort of stubbornness could persuade a magical key to accept you as its bearer.

“He wants me to teach him combative magic,” the mage rants to the knight in one of their too tiny ship cabins, the one he’s appropriated for the night. They’re grounded, they’ve a very nice tent and a wonderful large clearing to set it up in and a big lovely open sky to do it under, but the kid is out there with his mouth and his ego and the mage can’t stand another minute of it. He’ll sleep on bare iron floor just so the boy can have the tent, so the boy can pretend it’s a happy fun camping trip and, most importantly, so the boy will be somewhere else for four or five hours. Or until he discovers some new complaint, or raises his voice in some typical exclamation of pointlessness. It can penetrate through the ship’s hull, the mage is positive.

“Offensive magic. Fireballs and craters and ‘boom,’ like he says.” The mage angrily swipes a hand through the air. “We’re supposed to be protecting these worlds, not tearing them up.”

The knight looks like he’s considering something. Never a good sign. “It might be a good idea to teach him eventually,” he drawls finally, accent honey thick and unchanging no matter how many worlds they’ve visited or will visit. “That key channels magic, like you said, so he’ll have to learn how to use it at some point and you can’t exactly stop him from practicing on his own. Teaching him might at least prevent accidents later on?” 

Cloaked in the knight’s patient and oh so reasonable tones, the suggestion doesn’t sound so much like the complete and utter impracticality the mage knows it to be. Somehow, that’s almost more annoying than the boy being demanding about it. The mage doesn’t want patience. The mage doesn’t want pragmatism or even resignation. He wants a supporter, and who was the knight friends with anyway, the longtime ally or the upstart?

‘Both’ is not the answer the mage wants to hear, nor is endorsement of something the boy had suggested.

“Sure.” The mage snorts. “So he can blow us up in battle with a miscast, or melt a hole through the ship trying to light a candle while we’re between worlds.”

The knight demurs, he doesn’t think that likely at all. The boy is very reliable in his own way, really, or he tries to be. Under all the unpolished edges is the hint of their prophesied hero, the blazing righteous spirit of the savior they’ve been looking for. The boy has foundations. The boy has talent. The boy is learning. He’s getting better and stronger and more comfortable with himself as the Keyblade Master with each locked star. One simply has to anticipate his …temporary lapses.

“His complete and utter lack of good judgment, you mean.”

“You were young once, too,” the knight says, finally annoyed or what passed for ‘annoyed’ within his perpetual mellowness. 

The mage doesn’t have anything to say to that. He glares instead and the knight blinks placidly, and after a terse ‘I’ll think about it’ the knight very chivalrously retreats with his victory. The mage puts off doing anything constructive in favor of some good old-fashioned silent, wrathful brooding. 

It’s the big bleeding problem right there isn’t it, he thinks sourly, watching his old friend tromp gracelessly towards the airlock (no wonder he and the boy got along so well, with their similarities). The big bleeding problem with the boy that no one can do anything about, not even the boy himself.

It’s the fact that he’s a child. The boy is a teenager, all of fourteen years out in the world and most of them spent on an unremarkable spit of beach playing in the waves with his friends. He doesn’t know crap about space travel or invasions of darkness or keyblades, and why should he be expected to? He doesn’t have any precedents on a disconnected, peaceful world. He’s got no standards of heroism or soldiering except what he’s heard about in storybooks. He had no life threatening disasters before this one to teach him about duty or priorities. The mage wonders sometimes if their mutual resentment is really a result of the arguments or because of what they see in each other; what one used to be and regrets leaving, and what one could mature into and dreads becoming.

The mage hopes desperately that innocence is not what drew the Keyblade. They might be able to keep the boy alive, might be able to take him to all the places his quest and his destiny requires, but the mage knows as sure as the sun will rise that they’re not going to be able to keep him innocent. Every battle, even the ones that the boy thinks are games, are going to teach him about pain until, (worst case scenario, but the mage has always been a pessimist at heart), it becomes the only thing he knows. And it isn’t as though anyone would ask it of him. It isn’t as though anyone would want that for him, or for any child. But it can happen and it will happen and the mage knows that that how the boy copes will decide whether they’ll have a Keyblade Master afterwards, or just a broken shell.

It’s enough to earn the King two right hooks in the mage’s mental tab. Making them watch that. Making them a party to it.

But there’s no choice. They’re stuck with this mission, stuck with the boy and he with them and they may not be the best of friends but they’re all they’ve got out in enemy territory.

“I suppose we ought to be thankful he’s lasted this long,” the mage grudgingly admits.

The knight drapes an extra blanket over the boy, sprawled boneless in his sleep and fingers twitching as he dreams. “I think you’re underestimating him.”

“Whatever.”

The boy mumbles something. It sounds an awful lot like ‘teach me magic.’

The mage’s hands tighten on his wand as he resists the urge to swat the kid.

“….so are you ever going to...” the knight begins after a moment.

“No.”

“But he …”

“No.” The mage looks briefly annoyed. “It wouldn’t do any good if I tried to teach him, okay? He’s not ready.”

“How will you know when he’s ready?” the knight persists.

“I have mage senses,” the mage snaps. “They’ll tingle.”

“…gawrsh, really?”

“No. Now shut up, we’re landing.”

 

*********

 

Accordance IV

 

The boy absolutely refuses to drop this magic business. He gets more and more frustrated with each denied request but soldiers on, bringing it up in company so the mage has to make excuses not only to the boy but to the knight and the gang at Traverse Town. The mage has also caught the boy watching him from under lowered lashes more than a few times, mimicking the mage’s actions during spellcasting as if declaring that, fine, he doesn’t need a teacher, he’ll just get the hang of it on his own, he’s the Keyblade Master and he can do anything and everything all by himself. He doesn’t need instruction. He doesn’t need help. 

What’s worse is that he imagines it to be a secret, those few spells he’s finally managed to activate. He’s oh so very careful to hide his practice trials, so cautious about not using magic in front of his companions, no doubt planning to impress them both one day with some kind of convenient and showy exhibition that the boy will just casually dismiss as ‘a few things he’d picked up here and there.’ Eager to impress, like any child.

The mage doesn’t have to see anything to know what’s going on. He can smell the disturbed energy in the air like ozone. He can feel the roiling currents left in the wake of the boy’s clumsy handling, like the bubbles and churning water left behind by a boat propeller in the ocean. Sometimes he’ll even notice it in the confined air of the gummi ship, which never fails to trip all his internal alarms. All it takes is one fire spell to eat up all their oxygen or blow out the side of the ship and the boy is all too capable of triggering just such a result accidentally. The Keyblade has to be acting as an enhancer for the boy’s meager natural talents; no untrained amateur should be able to ‘copy’ spells just by seeing them performed a few times and then mimicking the caster’s actions.

The mage thinks, and not for the first time, that the Keyblade is a truly powerful tool, or it would be if it weren’t in the hands of an idiot. 

The boy melts a hole in the ship’s hull perhaps a week later, trying out a light spell that he’d either copied or wheedled out of someone, the mage never finds out which. Fortunately, they’re not in space at the time. The mage screams himself hoarse, cursing the boy for doing it, the whoeveritwas that might have taught him the spell, the Knight for not stopping it, the King for being the cause of everything in the first place, and himself for being too good to stoop to infanticide. 

Cid is roaring and chomping at them even before they limp into port, a near seamless blend between the rant on the viewscreen and them opening the hatch to hear it live. Weeks, he growls, chewing furiously on his cigar. Weeks it’ll take to fix this, what the hell were you doing with it, goddamn civilians trying to handle delicate equipment they’d no training with, letting kids mess with it. 

“They don’t let me pilot,” the boy grumbles, entirely missing the point.

The mage pointedly doesn’t say anything about asteroids, even at the risk of privately agreeing with Cid which was only slightly worse than publicly agreeing with Cid. Mages and engineers don’t get along on principle.

So they’re stuck in Traverse Town yet again (which has never seemed smaller), stuck with Traverse Town’s Heartless denizens barely putting a dent in the boy’s overabundant energy stockpiles and stuck with Traverse Town’s human denizens getting more and more politely desperate. The boy has a thing for rooftops and amazingly inconvenient unlocked doors. He and Yuffie are unholy terrors and no one believes for a moment that teaching the boy ‘how to ninja’ has anything to do with training to fight the Heartless. 

It takes only a short while for the delay to chafe both guests and hosts; Cid forced to resort to chasing the boy out of his shop with the business end of a very wicked looking spear and Leon taking to disappearing for entire days so the boy can’t pester him for matches. Suddenly all the townspeople have Looks and Cid has Looks and Leon has Looks and even patient and saintly Aerith has Looks, and the mage wants to know who put the sign on his back that says Responsible For Stupid.

“This is supposed to be our savior?” Leon demands out of the boy’s hearing, stormy gray-blue gaze cold on the teenager’s poorly restrained exuberance as he chases Yuffie around. The boy is nursing a few strained tendons, results of his own enthusiastic idiocy during yet another ill-fated sparring match. Leon hadn’t even need to knock him down this time. “I thought you two were supposed to be teaching him how to fight. We need him to fight.”

“He can fight just fine,” the mage snaps back, sick of this conversation and the fact that the boy is not doing anything to inspire anyone’s confidence. “The Keyblade takes care of itself.”

“He’s going to get killed if you let this continue.” Leon isn’t taking the boy’s injury well, as if it were some kind of personal insult to himself.

“Who said I’m in charge of him?”

“He’s only fourteen,” comes the reply after a second’s pause, and the mage resists the urge to roll his eyes. Of course. Iceheart’s only weakness, his oh so tragic past. A few too many hits across the boy’s thick skull and Leon is starting to see defeat in him, great destiny be damned, the same helpless defeat that a younger Leon had suffered at the claws of the Heartless when Radiant Garden fell. Suffered and never recovered from.

Which still isn’t the mage’s problem. He whips out his wand and zaps a shadow Heartless that had appeared across the square. “So train him why don’t you, if you’re so worried.”

“What?”

“He whacks things with a blunt object. You whack things with a pointy object. He’ll do anything you ask if you throw the word ‘rematch’ in there ….or actually, he’d do anything you ask anyway.”

Leon’s scowl is almost worth the irritation of this conversation, and the mage smiles unkindly. “Anyway, I’m sure you can teach him much more about how to stay alive than I can, seeing as you’re so good at it.” 

The scowl disappears as Leon’s face shuts down. He’s never forgiven himself for surviving where others from his world did not, and everyone knows it, and the mage almost, almost feels bad for using it as a weapon, except that Leon is supposed to be the leader of the Traverse Town faction which is allied with the King, and so far all he’s done by way of ‘help’ for the King’s men is shove the boy at the them and then bitch about their lack of progress.

The mage tells himself he is a very unscrupulous duck, and that he will feel very bad about this later, and pushes the dagger in deeper. “It’s probably best that we came in when we did, anyway. We met up with some nasty creatures on that last world and he rushed in, of course, before we could catch up, and by the time we got there— ”

Leon cuts him off far too quickly to even pretend that his frigid disinterest is still genuine. “You said he could handle himself.” 

“I am not a blademaster, and neither is my partner,” the mage bluntly informs the scarred man. “You are. If you’re not going to train him, don’t whine at me when he gets hurt because he’s untrained.”

“If he got hurt, it would be because you allowed it.” Leon had never been a gracious loser.

The mage shrugs as he saunters off, triumphant. “Pain is the best teacher.”

When the boy comes running up to him later, all but bursting at the seams with excitement because omigosh omigosh Leon was going to teach him Leon was actually going to spend time with him and train him omigosh, the mage can’t resist tossing a wink at the knight’s mildly incredulous expression.

“And here I thought you didn’t like him,” the knight remarks once the boy is gone, cautiously pleased on the boy’s behalf but unsure of what could have possibly prompted the mage to do something for their third.

“Are you kidding?” The mage cackles. “Leon will pound him into the concrete and he’ll just ask for more. He’ll be so busy collecting bruises from his idol he’ll finally leave me alone about teaching him magic. I should have done this weeks ago.”

The knight just sighs his patient sigh. So much for altruism.

Handing the boy off to Leon proves to be an excellent move anyway. The boy’s idol worship complex is rocked a bit by the shock of reality, that Leon wasn’t going to pull any punches during this training and wasn’t going put up with anything less than the boy’s most sincere, concentrated efforts. Leon proves in some way the mage had never been able to impress on the boy that this isn’t a game, and slowly, ever so slowly, the seriousness of the scarred man’s attitude towards fighting the Heartless leeches into the boy’s own. There are even fewer complaints in the field, less of ‘why me’ and more of ‘for the sake of those that can’t defend themselves.’ 

“Don’t strain anything patting yourself on the back,” Cid comments sourly, annoyed by the mage’s vindictive glee. “He may be learning how to swing around that stick of his, but Iceheart’ll fuck him up just by association. He won’t learn cooperation in battle. Leon’s never heard of it.”

Leon had, actually, he just preferred to fight without the company of crotchety pilots and klepto ninjas and occasionally overbearing flower girls who had never learned to take his orders as a commander and never would. And, personal lone wolf preferences or not, Leon had been a dedicated soldier on his homeworld, and like any soldier he’d been trained in melee combat, how to work around and with other troops. By virtue of iron will and patience and the unforgiving flat of his gunblade (and just to spite Cid), he inexorably drills the importance of teamwork into the boy’s spiky head. It’s worth enduring the boy’s complaints about sadistic leather wearing crazies just to see his amazingly rapid progress with the Keyblade.

“Guard high!” Leon barks sharply, while the boy grits his teeth and whips around barely in time to block an attack by a soldier type Heartless springing on him from the roof above. The knight looks briefly worried but the mage has to resist the urge to cackle evilly. Leon believed in practical exercises, which meant live enemies, and the mage has nothing but approval for it. Leon also believed that certain comments to Yuffie about ‘defeating Heartless with one hand tied behind my back’ were a personal affront to whatever warrior code that the scarred man (and the boy, by default as a student) followed, and the boy now found himself facing off against a field of Heartless with one arm, indeed, strapped behind his back with two of Leon’s belts. 

The mage heartily approves of this as well. 

“Atta boy!” he calls, as the kid is knocked off his feet by a Heartless he hadn’t even seen coming and swarmed under by shadows. Leon is eventually obliged to stride over and fish the boy out by his collar.

“Is this really training?” Aerith asks waspishly. She doesn’t often come to watch, and this is exactly why, with the mage’s all too obvious delight over the boy getting a beatdown.

The mage looks innocent. “What else would it be?”

“Flirting,” Yuffie yawns from her rooftop perch, absently twirling Conformer as she watches the boy and Leon fight back to back, the swordsman covering his student’s deficiencies until the boy learned how to stop favoring his unhindered side. “Flirt flirt flirt.”

“Jealous?” the mage needles, in far too good a mood to let Aerith’s disapproval ruin it.

The ninja girl flips nimbly off the roof and lands as gracefully as any dancer, grinning her most untrustworthy grin. “I saw him first. You should have sent him to me for training.”

“Light forbid,” Cid mutters, shouldering past them with a crate of parts. “One of you’s bad enough.”

Yuffie’s magnificent comeback is interrupted by a shadow crawling up from the cobblestones between them, a straggler from the designated arena, so she settles for sticking her tongue out at Cid and swatting the Heartless in his direction before dashing over to run damage control on the other crawlies that were straying out of the combat zone to hone in on hearts more vulnerable than Leon’s and the boy’s. Cid loses his cigar screeching obscenities after her, dancing around trying to avoid the shadow while keeping his hold on the full crate. 

Later, with all Heartless cleared and lesson learned, the boy drops down to one knee, hanging off the Keyblade, exhausted and out of breath and something close to hard won contentment on his face when Leon offers him a gloved hand and a rare, quiet word of approval. It matches the distant satisfaction that is Leon’s expression, and for a moment elder and younger look exactly the same.

The last one left watching from the top of the stairs, the mage idly decides he doesn’t exactly disapprove of this. For the moment.

 

 

************

 

 

 

They’re hacking their way through a tropical jungle, tired and sweaty and being eaten alive by bugs that don’t seem to care that they’re offworlders. The mage takes a vicious pleasure in zapping the buzzing pests with tiny lightning spells when they get too close, but he can only target the ones he can see and for every bug fried crispy there’s thirty ducking past his guard and chewing on him. 

The boy’s canteen is empty, despite warnings not to drink too much before they could find a fresh source. The knight has been letting the boy into his remaining supply. The mage has already taken his friend to task for it, but the knight’s argument is annoyingly valid: if or when the Heartless show up, as they inevitably would, they’d need the Keyblade in battle more than they needed the knight’s shield. It was the duty of the King’s men to protect the key and the one who carried it, and the Keyblade Master would in turn protect them by doing his job, defeating Heartless. 

The mage scowls. The mage grumbles, accent thick with exhaustion. “I’m not carrying you when you collapse from dehydration.”

The knight smiles his amiable, empty-headed smile as he points out that the mage wouldn’t be able to carry him anyway.

Both the boy and the knight are panting in disturbing unison by the time they reach a break in the foliage. Blinding white and blue greets them; they’ve hit the end of the jungle and the start of this world’s ocean. Laid out before them is a perfectly picturesque white sand beach, complete with palm trees and tropical blue waters and a bright cheery sun beating down on them.

The boy’s pack hits the ground.

The mage whips his head around in alarm at the noise. “Heartless?” he demands, eyes darting wildly and energy already crackling along the length of his staff. But the boy doesn’t reply, isn’t even listening, every nerve and sensor in his overheated body focused on the shallow water just ahead.

Before the mage can even open his beak in admonishment about the mission, the boy’s ripped and dirty clothes are on the sand next to the pack and he’s running naked as the day he was born into the waves, screeching and splashing as the cool water hits his skin. 

What’s worse is that the knight is right behind him.

“Our lucky break!” the boy yells before taking a deep breath and disappearing under the surface. Island brat that he is, he’s more at home in the water than even the mage, whose native species should’ve given him the distinction as most aquatically inclined. The boy breaches a few seconds later, throwing up spray that hangs in the air like a thousand flecks of diamond. The mage realizes, belatedly, that this is probably what the boy’s home looks like. Looked like.

The knight splutters happily as a wave comes up to his chest and nearly bowls him over. Another step out and the next wave succeeds, sweeping him off his feet and carrying him towards shore. He shakes his head like the dog he is, tongue lolling out and beaming foolishly. “How about it, Donald?”

The mage taps his foot impatiently. Being the one wearing feathers, he’s got more layers on in this heat than either of his companions and he isn’t dropping all sense of professionalism to go splash around in any oceans when they’ve still got a mission to accomplish. 

“Is this enough water for ya?” the knight adds, and belatedly the mage remembers that he’d stupidly announced his latest invention; a useful little concocted spell that could purify salt water to fresh if given enough time. Great. Now the two had an Excuse.

The boy erupts out of the waves with his hands clenched tightly around something silver that wiggles furiously in his grasp. “Fish for dinner, boys!” he crows, waving his catch around by the tail and promptly almost losing it back into the blue. 

“Nice one!” The knight looks on appreciatively and the boy noticeably preens. “Watch this,” he brags, letting the fish escape. “I’ll catch a much bigger one. No one was better than me at this back on the island.”

The mage eye-twitches. “Did I say we were stopping long enough to eat?” 

The boy and the knight look over in unison, identical idiot looks on their faces. “But I’m hungry,” the boy protests.

“You’re always hungry. Hungry is your natural state of being, I’ve decided.” The mage never thought he’d see the old adage about adolescent males and bottomless stomachs proved irrevocably true, but then again the mage never thought he’d see a lot of things. “So if you’ll both just –”

“THERE GOES ONE!” the knight yelps suddenly, pointing at something in the crystal clear shallows and hopping around. “GET IT GET IT THERE IT GOES!”

The boy yowls and dives in pursuit. The knight flails after, squawking directions that the boy probably can’t even hear. 

“Right! Left! Other left! Chase it this way!” The knight widens his stance and spreads his arms like a sumo wrestler, or a father bracing for the pitch from his son. “I’ll get it!”

“Death to fishies!” the boy roars, breaking surface. 

They both pounce in an explosion of water. The fish, predictably, escapes. 

After several minutes of speechless, rabid eye-twitching, the mage eventually lets his breath out in an explosion of frustrated air and goes to dump his gear in the shade of a nearby palm tree. There is no winning against idiots, especially idiots in concert. 

He goes about setting up what he’ll need to start purifying seawater. Engrossed as his companions are in …whatever the hell they’re doing (it looks an awful lot like they’re trying to drown each other), he figures there’s little to no chance of even getting their attention.

He’ll let them play. 

Sometime later, so focused on his work that he’s not even realized that the background noise of shrieks and splashing have stopped, a few cool drops blown his way by the breeze alert him to an uninvited spectator. He looks over his shoulder to find entirely too much slick skin and dripping hair and wide blue eyes invading his shadow. 

He hunches instinctively. “Will you back off? I need room to work here.”

The boy licks the salt from his lips, not deterred in the slightest. “This is magic, right? Teach me how.”

“Forget it.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re naked. Go away.”

The boy sticks his tongue out and runs off, back to the knight. The mage shakes his head.

The boy gets him back sometime later with a bucket of water ‘accidentally’ sloshed all over him when the boy ‘accidentally’ tripped over a great mound of nothing in the sand. The knight and the boy howl with laughter, while the mage drips and eyes the two of five freshwater containers that the impromptu deluge has just re-contaminated.

“Guess we’ll be here a while longer, won’t we?” the boy says airily, twirling the empty bucket around a finger. He doesn’t look sorry at all.

“You…you…you….” The mage can’t speak for his rage. He settles for leveling a finger. “You.”

The boy affects innocence. “Me?”

“Are so very dead.” The mage lunges, abandoning all pretense at dignity in the face of absurdity. The culprit shrieks in half panic, half delight, and dodges away, and then proceeds to nearly choke himself laughing at the mage’s vows of grievous bodily injury (the knight had prudently hidden the mage’s wand upon seeing the boy’s intent-to-soak). 

“When I get my hands on you--”

“Gotta catch me first!” the boy yells back at him, grinning his hellcat grin, darting one way and then the other in a flurry of sand. “Come on, I’m over here!” He wheels away. 

They pound sand up the beach until the land gives way to water and they’re chasing each other through the shallows of a cove. The mage finds, to his great chagrin, that the boy is not only at least as (or more than) comfortable in the water as he is on land, but he is also damn quick, even underwater. Leon would be pleased with his student’s versatility. The mage is not.

He is also not prepared for the boy to stop on a dime and reverse course, wicked grin flashing as he is abruptly tackled backwards into the surf.

“Acckktthpt,” the mage splutters, spitting salt-water, while the boy’s laughter rings in his ears. It’s deep enough here that the mage actually has to tread water. 

Advantage to the boy. A wiry pair of arms wrapping around the mage’s torso or legs is the only warning he gets before he is repeatedly yanked under, like a gull bobbing on the surface dragged down by a grouper. Under the water there isn’t anything except bubbles and brief glimpses of tanned skin and endless blue. He thrashes wildly.

He comes up hissing and spitting after yet another dunking he hadn’t even seen coming, and then whips around to glare blindly at the source of the laughter he can hear but not see. The knight’s height and weight at least had evened out the contest when the boy had been trying to dunk him, but the mage has no such advantage against a human, even a scrawny half grown one.

The boy breaks the surface like a demented crocodile; forehead, eyes, and then leer rising from the water. “Whatsa matter, duck?” he taunts. He’s hip deep and still on his feet where the mage has to swim. “I thought water’s supposed to be your natural element?”

The mage smirks at him.

The boy blinks, the only action he has time for before the knight tackles him sideways into the blue. When he surfaces, it’s to two very similar, very wicked smiles.

“Hey no fai--”

“DUNK THE ROOKIE!” they both scream, and fall mercilessly upon him.

By the time the massacre is finished (the boy never had a chance, not against two of them, at least until the knight switched sides and the mage was forced to gleefully resort to water magic to keep the battle even), the sun has somehow slipped almost to the horizon, and someone remarks innocently that since they’ve been here this long, they may as well stay ‘til morning, right? 

The mage and the knight exchange looks, while the someone in question digs his toes into the sand and waits for some kind of protest.

“This place really is just like my island,” the boy has been saying all day, except not. He hasn’t been saying it loud. Everything about him has been saying it. He grew up in a place just like this, with wind and water and sand, and he played in the waves and caught fish and climbed trees for their fruit and chased his friends through the shallow water and lived very happily, thank you, without any thought of responsibility or duty or killing or enemies or the honest gritty reality of being a hero to people that needed one.

The mage refuses to recognize that little twinge in his ribcage as guilt, because it is ridiculous to feel guilty over something that one had no control over. It isn’t as though the mage himself made the Keyblade choose the boy, and it wasn’t the mage who believed in some kind of prophecy about the Keyblade Master saving the world, and it wasn’t the mage who caused all this distress and destruction in the first place. The mage hasn’t specifically pulled the boy out of his world and into Traverse Town. The mage had been trying his damndest not to encourage the boy’s hero complex, which hadn’t really been working, since the boy had insisted from the very beginning that he come along and be part of the quest and what else could the mage do, but demand that, fine, but the boy better start acting like a proper Keyblade Master if that was what he was so bent on being recognized as.

It isn’t the mage’s fault what they’re doing to this child, one day at a time. It’s not his fault at all, and what he should be saying is that no, they have to get going, back to the grind of the mission, they don’t have time for this delay…

“We can spare a night,” he hears himself say. 

The boy beams, one of his dawn-breaking smiles that melt even the iciest defenses (Leon came to mind), and takes off at a dead run, promising to get them all some of the fruit he’d seen hanging from such and such a tropical tree. Kid on a camping trip. Just a sun browned kid pelting up the beach, calling back to his friends over the sound of the waves. No saviors of the universe here. 

This is how it should have been for him. This is how he should have been left.

The mage might have said this aloud, because the knight’s hand finds his shoulder. “Steady,” he says.

“What are we doing?” the mage asks. Blindly. “What are we doing here, with this kid?” 

“The only thing we can do.”

“And that’s supposed to justify--”

“He’s a good kid,” the knight says patiently. Not comforting, but patient. God knows how anyone could be so patient at a time like this. “He and Max would get along, I think.” He speaks so easily of the son he’d left behind. 

“……”

“And we’re not helpless, you know? He’s not going to die on our account.”

They don’t talk about things like this. It’s hard enough bearing up under the doubts and suspicions and assumptions of the Traverse Town posse, who have it worse since they can’t be there day to day. They push the kid harder by not being around and know that they crush the boy under the weight of their expectations. They blame themselves more for doing it, too. The mage and the knight just get to be the escorts, the Hero’s Companions, the ones that will shoulder the blame and the burden when someday, the Hero lets his guard down and something gets him through the back. 

They ought to leave the boy here. Deserted tropical beach. No Heartless. No more savior of the universe bullshit. He’d survive. The worlds could just go ahead and find someone else to be their messiah, some other pure hearted sap to pick up the title of Hero and dust it off and get killed in its name.

But they won’t do that. They can’t.

The mage says nothing.

“He’s calling us.” The knight’s ears are sharper. The mage can’t hear anything over the sound of the ocean.

“….then we’d better go.” The mage clears his throat, striving for his regularly scheduled annoyance and failing. “Before something eats him or he sets himself on fire somehow.”

The Keyblade Master calls, and they can’t do anything except follow.

 

 

**********

 

 

 

They’re in Traverse Town again, looking for the wizard called Merlin. The boy has made no secret of his eagerness to meet a _real_ sorcerer (this being said with a significant Look at the mage, of course). The mage rolls his eyes but offers no other reaction. He is distracted and has been for some time now, and has his own reasons for wanting to speak with Traverse Town’s resident adept. Leon and the others want to know Merlin’s opinion on the Keyblade Master. The Keyblade Master wants to know Merlin’s opinion on the Keyblade Master. Yet an expert’s opinion of the Keyblade bearer is, perhaps strangely, the furthest thing from the mage’s feverish mind.

They leave the underground passage in a mix of emotions. The boy of course is higher than a kite on validation and the excitement of newly activated spells and the promise of further magical education. If he’s still thinking about a beach with white sand he gives no hint. The knight alternates between joining in the boy’s enthusiasm and puzzling over the mage’s unexplained, abrupt descent into brooding dark fury.

“What did you and Merlin talk about, when we were upstairs?” the knight questions, hanging back a little from the boy. He needn’t have bothered. The boy is already talking Yuffie and Leon’s ears off and giving completely unnecessary demonstrations of his new arcane abilities. 

“Things,” the mage answers shortly. 

“Things like..?”

“Things like things I am not discussing right now.”

The knight blinks slowly. “Isn’t he going to teach—”

“Oh he’ll teach. He’ll give the kid everything he knows about magic,” the mage says bitterly. “But it won’t be enough.”

And he refuses to say any more.

The knight shoots him concerned looks every now and then while the boy obliviously goes on about his business of annoying everyone and everything. The mage pretends not to see. He’s not angry any longer. He’s simply tired.

In the evening they scatter to separate bedrooms. Privacy is a rare luxury, and they take advantage of it when they can. 

Caged by the walls of his room, the mage paces. 

There are things that being the Royal Wizard entails that he has not mentioned to either of his companions. Duties. Responsibilities. Understandings, some of them in such confidence that not even the knight is privy to them. The only ones who know are the only ones who need to know, like the mage and his King and adepts like Merlin.

It is the duty of those who would harness the energies and elements of the universe to understand the forces they deal with. It is their duty to command and maintain these forces responsibly. It is their duty to care for and keep the secrets of the natural world that are better off left outside public knowledge.

A twist of soft light pulses almost invisibly in the corner of the room. He eyes it absently. A Heartless had been in here not long ago, but it was gone now. Through the door, or back the way it came, through the oddity of light.

It is not an oddity of light.

He mutters a Word of dismissal under his breath and watches the highway entrance dissipate with a soft pop! of displaced air.

Contrary to most assumptions, the Heartless were not actually able to appear and disappear at will. They flicker in and out of solid reality using a method of travel that the mage, and all creatures of the natural world, were intimately acquainted with.

They are called the wild roads. They are secret highways, paths cut through reality by ancient magics. They are tesseracts, contracting and connecting impossible distances. They are the dark, silent, invisible paths of the worlds that run through both time and space. To those empowered to walk them (and not all are, for the highways are not without danger and can sorely test their travelers), they are shortcuts between walls, between cities, between continents, between planets. To vanish through the entrance of one and then appear in another location thousands of miles away is their doing.

The Heartless use them extensively. The Heartless infest them. They have done so since the unexplained fall of Radiant Garden, using the wild roads to travel an afflicted world like worms burrowing through a rotten apple. The highways deteriorate under their use, becoming corrupted and tangled as Heartless and other, more unnatural creatures pour through them. Even the greatest of the wild roads, the King’s Highways that are cut between stars (and the boy thought interspace travel was just aimlessly buzzing from planet to planet) have become unsafe. They are filled with debris and danger, abandoned since the early measures of quarantine were taken against infected worlds. The mage, being the resident pilot and so the one responsible for bouncing off the random meteor, doesn’t think either of his companions really appreciate what kind of horrific shape the King’s Highways have fallen into.

Well, he can’t do anything about that. The star roads are called the King’s Highways because his power maintains them, and they won’t be cleared until the King returns. If the King returns. 

But the in-world highways are the business of those who walk them. Every sorcerer, hedge-witch, magician and adept across every world in the multiverse takes an oath during their apprenticeship to protect and care for the wild roads. The mage had taken the same. He’d pledged himself to give his aid, if and when it should ever be needed, to the traditional guardian of those roads, the creature they called the Majicou.

The mage had never personally seen the Majicou. The mage didn’t know anyone that had ever personally seen the Majicou, except perhaps the King, who wouldn’t ever say if he’d ever personally seen the Majicou. The mage knew the Majicou through reputation and legend only. He was supposedly old, older than Disney Castle, he was supposedly wise, he was supposedly powerful. He was definitely absent, and had been for quite some time as far as the mage knew. 

He had been told that the Majicou had his reasons. He believed that. He still believes that. The Majicou is the caretaker of the wild roads and there are always threats to the wild roads. There are always humans who crave power they didn’t deserve and seek to tread where they were not welcome or meant. There are always those whose curiosity leads them down dark paths. 

The legends of the wild roads and the Majicou are varied, often contradicting, and more than half of them probably false or greatly exaggerated. The one that isn’t is the story about the Majicou’s great nemesis. 

This story said that once, long ago, humanity produced an enemy of the natural world. It said that there appeared a man who sought to understand the secrets of nature and master the unseen forces of life itself. It said that this man was eventually consumed by his obsession. He tortured and maimed innocents in his quest for forbidden knowledge. He tortured and maimed himself. He succeeded, or partially succeeded, and his success flooded the wild roads with darkness and death and nearly brought about the end of all things. 

He had several names. His enemies knew as him as the Alchemist, and the legend said that he was dealt with. 

It didn’t say exactly how. But it warned that there would always be others who thought the same way the Alchemist had, that they might be the exceptions to the laws of existence. It warned that there would always be other alchemists, deliberately or ignorantly following in the footsteps of the great Enemy.

The mage thinks, looking back, that he’d never quite believed that. Or rather thought it was a possibility, but not a very definite one.

And then news had come to the Castle of an incident at Radiant Garden. A catastrophe. An infection.

A plague of shadows.

It is nine years later and still no one knows the exact circumstances that led to Radiant Garden’s fall. No one knows what happened to that kingdom’s ruler, who they heard later from the King had been researching Heartless. No one has discovered the source of the Heartless invasion. What they know for certain is that darkness overruns the wild roads and forces them into twisting, dangerous tracts, paths that lead to the vulnerable, formerly inaccessible hearts of worlds. What they know for certain are the effects, not the cause. 

And the effects are unmistakably those of another Alchemist.

Merlin declares this while the boy and the knight were upstairs in his bizarre hermit’s house, the boy delighted over his new magical abilities and the knight delighted in him. The mage does not hear their rowdy enthusiasm. The mage bows his head, for this is their worst fears realized, and the King is not here to tell him what to do. At this point the Majicou isn’t likely to show up either.

Another Alchemist. An unidentified Enemy. A rogue sorcerer, perhaps, someone who had rejected their vows and sought to exploit the secrets of the natural world for his or her own dangerous, selfish ends. The King’s men had hoped that what had happened at Radiant Garden (whatever it was exactly, that had happened at Radiant Garden) was at best an accident, at worst an isolated incident. The mage had hoped that the corruption of the wild roads was some kind of side effect from the disaster and not the deliberate result. Corruption could be cleansed. Damaged roads could be healed. The packs of Heartless ranging the highways were threats, yes, but mindless and predictable and, if one got right down to it, not all that difficult to handle if you knew what you were doing.

Not so if they were facing a human Enemy. A human enemy, likely a powerful sorcerer, that would actively fight them. An Alchemist would lead them astray if he could. An Alchemist would sabotage and tangle the highways without a second thought, disrupting that world’s natural flow of energy and poisoning it from the inside. An Alchemist would command the Heartless and use them cleverly, dangerously, to his best advantage. An Alchemist would plot, analyze, adapt. An Alchemist would kill without hesitation. 

They are in serious trouble if an Alchemist waits for them at the end of their quest to defeat the Heartless.

The mage asks if Merlin has any clues to the identity of this Enemy. Merlin does not. Merlin has freely admitted his ignorance over the causes and specific events of this crisis, as well as how precisely to deal with it. The mage is more than a little shaken by such admissions. He had thought, very logically, that they would be able to count on an adept’s knowledge of the situation to help them out. With Yen Sid and the King and the Majicou all so very conveniently out of reach, Merlin is one of the last authorities that might have had some idea what was going on. 

And all he can tell them is that their Enemy might be the most dangerous kind of all; the cunning and discreet.

Merlin strokes his beard, looking a great deal more grim than when he’d been dealing with the boy. His vows prevent him from discussing the Alchemist and the wild roads with anyone who was not an initiated member of the magical community, but he has said he will leave the choice to share information, relevant or irrelevant as it might be, up to the mage. For now, this is a council for wizards only. He speaks in an old, formal tongue of his homeland for the sake of discretion. There are shadows even here in this sanctuary, and some of them may be listening.

“We know little for certain,” the old sorcerer says. “The Alchemist, any incarnation of him, has always found it necessary to work through proxies. It is possible that all our obvious enemies, as we encounter them, will turn out to be nothing more than pawns of a puppet-master.” He sips his tea. “As we are perhaps pawns ourselves.”

Pawns of an absent chess player. The Majicou also found it necessary to work through proxy. The mage knows this, it is a famous part of the legend surrounding him. The mage swore an oath at the beginning of his magical education to serve Majicou and the wild roads as one of those proxies, should the guardian ever require it of him. 

But there has been no word from Majicou. No word from him or any of the other adepts or from the King, save what small news Merlin brings. Orders from their absentee monarch. ‘Teach the boy.’ 

“Is he really the right one?” The mage has to ask. The boy was content with Merlin’s agreeing to teach him a few spells as proof of validation, but the mage had been watching the old man’s face. Just because he was an adept did not mean that he was an accomplished liar.

“Is he really the key of destiny?”

“He fulfills the requirements, at the moment,” Merlin answers cryptically. “And he would very much like to believe that he is the one. In the end that may be the more important quality.”

The mage crosses his arms. “That’s not an answer.”

Merlin remains serene. “It is all the answer I have to give you.”

“So we’re supposed to treat him as the real thing just because he wants to be.”

“We would be far unkinder treating him as the real thing if he were unwilling. The King believes in him, in any case. And you do, I assume, trust your King?”

“Of course I do!” the mage snaps, stung. “But, it’s just, if it turns out that he’s wrong—”

“He is more likely than any one of us to recognize a Keyblade Master, being one himself,” Merlin reminds. “And I am also convinced that the boy was not chosen arbitrarily. He is key to all of this; the coming darkness, the wild roads, the puppet-master. He must be instructed in his role.” The old man pauses. “He tells me you will not teach him magic.”

The mage has been expecting this. He replies, suddenly wary, that he is not qualified. 

“Your credentials would suggest otherwise.” 

“My credentials exaggerate. Yen Sid is Disney Castle’s non-resident adept, I’m just the guy at the front desk.” He lowers his gaze and executes the most formal of bows, a wizard’s apology. “It is not my place. I cannot teach the Keyblade Master.”

“You can, magician of the court. You can and you will.” Merlin’s voice is gentle but steely. He draws himself up without moving and the room seems to expand with his presence, his shabby blue robe becoming somehow stately, his face lined and stern like a stone saint’s. The air groans with the weight of old power. He is an adept, after all, perhaps the greatest of his kind, and his words are crystallized prophecy when he wishes them to be.

“Your King requests this of you. The boy is to be your apprentice.”

The mage had taken a step back despite himself, now he stiffens. His beak opens and closes without sound.

Teaching the boy a few handy tricks is one thing. The mage had already more or less resigned himself into being persuaded to that. But taking the boy as an apprentice, a full-fledged apprentice…that was something else entirely. A magician’s apprentice is more than a mere student. He/she is the center of the teacher’s world, as close as or closer than blood, closer than child, sibling, or spouse. A true magician’s greatest achievement is meant to be their heir. A true magician’s legacy is the knowledge and perspective they can impart to another, the connection of a perfectly matched, understanding, almost intuitive partnership. A student is meant as the successor of a soul. A student is meant as the culmination of all the teacher’s goals and hopes. 

The mage and the boy can’t even agree on where to eat lunch on any given day. 

“You must be joking,” he hears himself say.

Merlin doesn’t bother to respond to that.

“No.” The mage stares. “Just. No. No.” He watches the adept’s gaze flatten and recovers himself hastily. “I can’t. Yen Sid himself has said I’m barely more than a talented amateur. I’m not ready to take an apprentice. I am definitely not ready to take someone like him …the Keyblade Master.”

“And he is not ready to be taken,” Merlin says calmly. “Yet, you both are here, and there is no other time. 

“But— ”

“If the orders of your King will not compel you, your vows as a wizard should,” the old man adds.

The mage comes close to snarling. This is ridiculous. This is more than ridiculous. “It is also my right to refuse. My vows include an apprentice only of my choosing.”

“Your vows hold you to the preservation of the wild roads and of Kingdom Hearts. I have promised the Keyblade Master an education in the basics, and that is what I will deliver. I am, after all, somewhat experienced in the instruction of young boys.” Merlin smiles slightly, as if at some private joke. “But,” he continues, “that will not be enough. He will require more than a few sporadic lessons to play the part destiny has scripted for him. He’s going to need someone there day to day, and you are the only one in that position.”

“But you said…” The mage gestures angrily, helplessly. “We don’t even know if he’s the right one!” 

“Belief is power. His belief has carried him this far.” 

The mage glares. Adept or not, this is manipulation, and his temper frays under its cut. “I said no.”

“Circumstances have not given us that option.” Merlin sighs, as though the mage is trying to be difficult over something very simple. “Surely you can see that. There is no one else.”

“Us? What is this ‘us?’” The mage’s voice climbs. That was the last vestiges of his patience burning away, and though he’ll probably kill himself later for yelling at an adept, more than that a personal idol, he’s too angry at the moment to think straight. He jabs an accusing finger at the old man. “What I see is you pushing the responsibility on someone else, an adept driving an amateur into something he can’t handle and telling him the whole while that it’s necessary, that there’s no one else who can do it but him! What I see is the whole lot of you shoving your malarkey into someone else’s lap in hopes that he’ll somehow take care of all your problems for you! Fight the Heartless! Save the day! You’ll do just fine, or you’d damn well better, because there’s no one else that can.”

Merlin waits for the rant to end, eying him patiently, almost curiously. He asks, finally and gently, “Are you speaking of yourself, or of the child?”

The silence is so loud it rings.

Merlin continues after a moment, still in that same gentle tone. “I am sure the two of you have been doing the best you can for him. Your King will understand that.”

More silence.

“But you will not believe it from me, I suppose. That is understandable.” The adept speaks almost to himself. There is a drawn out pause, and then he continues in a more normal tone. “I can advise you only to continue the quest as you have been. Stay with the key. Defeat the shadows, lock the worlds, and look for the source of the darkness. In Majicou’s absence we of the magical community are acting guardians of the wild roads. You are Majicou’s proxy in this as well as your King’s. If an Alchemist awaits you, you know what must be done.”

He gets a response at last. A slow nod from the duck, who is staring very intently at the ground.

“I have not seen the wild roads in such a state for many centuries,” the old man admits quietly. “Things are about to become very bad for everyone. Do not let your guard down. The hearts of the worlds must be protected.”

Another slow nod. A resigned one.

“As for the boy..”

“No,” the mage repeats. Quietly, but firmly. 

“He needs a teacher.” Merlin is implacable.

The mage is just as implacable, but he speaks to the floor. “I will not teach a human.” 

Merlin considers him for a moment and says simply, with all the weight of all eternity, “Ah.”

Then, “we are finished here.”

The knight and the boy choose that very moment (or perhaps are compelled to choose that moment) to return to the main room, buzzing and loud with their usual enthusiasm. They don’t appear to notice Merlin’s closed expression or the mage’s unusual reticence. They thank Merlin and listen to his advice and spill out from his house in an energetic wave. They carry the mage out in their wake without any effort from him.

He and Merlin do not speak to each other as they pass. 

The mage stares despondently at the green wall of his appropriated room. This was not how he had planned his long awaited interview with the great adept Merlin going. Yet, he can’t think of any way it could have gone differently. 

Okay, so maybe he hadn’t needed to screech like a woman, but he’d been angry. And he definitely had every right to be angry.

They’re lying to the boy. All of them, the mage included, every day that they let him continue believing he is some kind of destined hero. He may have the talent (the Keyblade wouldn’t have chosen him otherwise), but Merlin had implied that he was simply one choice of others possible. Not the best. Not the only.

Was the boy really the Keyblade Master? Was he meant to be, or was he only trying to fulfill a role that other people had laid out for him, just because he had a little bit of aptitude for it and they were desperate?

…or, as Merlin said, did it even matter, so long as the boy chose his fate for himself?

The mage didn’t know. The mage didn’t know that and he didn’t know a lot of other things, like how they are supposed to restore the vanishing worlds and purify the wild roads and fight an Alchemist all on their own. 

He is sure that the Keyblade is the answer. The King is sure, Merlin is sure, and the boy is sure. But having the tool is not the same thing as being able to wield it, and the Keyblade is a magic weapon.

‘Teach the boy.’

“He is to be your apprentice.”

The mage suddenly wants very badly to break something.

He would not admit this to Merlin, or Yen Sid, or even his King, but the mage has already formed a few theories of his own about the Heartless invasion and the corruption of the highways. He knows the legends about the Alchemist. He knows the history of the wild roads. He knows that the old magics are always so threatened by human intervention, because of human curiosity, and is more than sure that the galaxy is in such a state today because of human mistakes. Because in some way, he is sure, of the notorious inconstancy of the human heart.

Disney Castle is powerful among the worlds. They have the Cornerstone, they have their King, and they have the teachings of adepts like Yen Sid, and most of all they have little to no interference by humanity. The wild roads were never meant for human travel. Magic, one might argue, has never been at its best in human hands, unless the human in question has been radically changed by it, as is often the case with the surviving adepts. Merlin and Yen Sid have lived far longer than any normal human. They are not, technically, completely mortal any longer. 

But the rogue sorcerers of history are always human. Because the wild roads do not bend for humans the humans resent, and because the humans resent they begin to meddle. And when they meddle, they upset the natural order of things. 

And when they stop meddling and begin to try and dominate, as humans are so unfortunately prone to doing, they willfully destroy the delicate balances of existence itself.

This is not to say that all villains in the history of ever have been human. The mage is not that illogical or narrow-minded. This is also not to say that humans with some limited talent for magic (Aerith and the boy himself, for example), are necessarily bad people. 

It is just, the mage feels that there are certain boundaries that ought to be respected. All animals, intelligent or otherwise, have an intuitive understanding of the energies that make up their worlds. Humans do not. Some humans can be taught, but they are more likely to flail and falter, and grasp for power where they should not. It is not precisely their fault. They are missing an integral sense, like smell or sight, an instinctive, primal capability that comes into use when one tries to manipulate energy.

How can the mage make an apprentice out of a human child, when it would be like trying to teach a deaf person to play music? How can the mage explain to someone else what was never explained to him, because he instantly, instinctively grasped the form and concept of his teacher’s lessons? Humans should teach humans magic, if humans needed to be taught magic at all.

Merlin said, the Keyblade is also born of the natural world’s energies.

Merlin said, the Keyblade is more than a weapon.

Merlin said, that boy is not what you think.

The mage has no idea what that is supposed to mean, but he can’t see how this is anything but a bad idea. 

He stares at nothing for a long, complex moment, and then raises his hands. Four fingered hands. Wings, a thousand years of evolution or mutation ago. 

The change moves slowly at first. A ripple of light, building in his palm, bleeding color into the white and re-arranging bones with tiny cracking noises. It moves up his arm, lengthening, solidifying, replacing. Muscles jellify and firm into unfamiliar, packed shapes. Tendons and nerves re-string. Tissues bloom. He stretches, contorts, rears up.

This is no amateur’s glamour. Illusions are easy to cast but difficult to maintain, and will not withstand physical contact or higher level magical scans. Shape-shifting is the better solution to their disguises when they travel to other worlds, the mage has found. The initial spell takes longer to cast (and to undo) and there are definite drawbacks to the vulnerability of mid-change and just after, when one has not yet adjusted to new balance or extra limbs. But a true shape-shift will hold under the physical punishment of combat and show up as nothing special under a scanning spell. 

The mage opens his eyes (an old habit, he’s never quite been able to break himself of closing his eyes during the transformation) and, swaying a little as he adjusts to his new height and the shifted center of balance, observes the human staring back at him from the mirror.

Pale skin, nearly albino. He had to work on that. Short white hair in tufts that look almost like feathers underneath the hat. Eyes so dark blue they are almost black. A human face that is not strikingly handsome (the object of a disguise being anonymity, after all) but comely, in its own alien way. The body looks to fall somewhere between Leon and Cid’s ages, or so he’s been told; he doesn’t have all that much experience with the physical aspect of human age. Not that it matters much with a form he can change at will. If he told the spell ‘child’ it would probably produce something like the boy, if he told it ‘adult’ it would produce this. He supposes ‘teenager’ would be somewhere between Yuffie and Leon.

The blue shirt had morphed and stretched along with the rest of him, but it looks odd draped across a different frame. He dismisses it with a flicker of will, leaving only the gold cuffs and the hat. If he wasn’t wearing pants, he might as well not wear the top. He understands human codes of dress and modesty but he is, after all, currently in the privacy of his own room. 

He looks at the naked reflection in the mirror critically; counting toes, judging the curves of certain muscles, measuring the length of bones. Everything seems to be in order. He’s gotten rather good at calling up this particular form, it’s been very useful as a disguise in some of the worlds they’ve visited that were not used to seeing intelligent, talking animals walking around. Useful, at least, until he’s required to run or fight in it, or do anything that reminds him he’s not in his comfortable, normal body. Useful until he remembers that the people he encounters would look at him with shock, scorn, or even fear if he were to reveal his true self. 

The boy is the worst, though. He stares constantly. He says it’s always so strange to see the mage and the knight in human forms. He gets quiet and reserved, like his companions somehow become strangers by changing their shapes, and he trails along behind them meekly because they suddenly look like the adults they are. 

The mage’s lip curls slightly in annoyance. He watches it in the mirror, detached, and lifts a five-fingered hand to the strangeness that is a flexible human mouth rather than a proper beak. Some things, he thinks, he will never get used to, no matter how much time he spends in this form. 

How could he teach something this clumsy to command magic?

The empty room holds no answer. He’d more or less expected that.

He pulls a cloak into existence and, draping it carelessly over his shoulders, steps out onto the room’s balcony. The stars look different to human sight. The night wind tugs playfully at him. It is only pleasantly cool outside but he shivers absently, used to feathers and down blocking the air. He notes the prickle of flesh on his arms. Cold, his new nerves inform him. He watches as mammalian hair rises in ancient, unconscious response. 

Humans are animals as well, he supposes. He is not sure why they have lost the animal’s instinctive understanding of magic. Perhaps as some kind of safeguard, or an evolutionary accident. He himself retains that extra sense, even in this form, because no matter what shape he wears his heart is still that of a beast. 

He lets go of the cloak, raises his strange human arms to the clear sky, and calls open the wild roads. 

The wind that engulfs him is instant, arctic, and gale-force. He can hear what sounds like voices, the sounds of other animals, the sounds of life itself. Noises and smells assault him that are too complex for his developed brain to decipher but are immediately recognized by his oldest instincts. They are the residue of thousands of years, of thousands of travelers, of thousands of souls that have worn this highway into its current tract. Ghost shapes pour past him in their own ceaseless passage. Animals or other, less easily defined creatures that walked this road yesterday or tomorrow or a million decades in the past 

The highway yawns wide to take him in. He can feel something like a membrane, invisible but stretched taut and uncomfortable across his unfamiliar skin. He pushes, twists, caught at the very threshold of reality. It gives but will not break and he knows why. He surrenders with a sigh and lets the human shape dissolve from around his soul, like melting ice surrounding a flame, and rises in an explosion of wings and light in the Greater shape that all travelers assume on the highways. 

Inside all animals, perhaps even some humans, are the trapped essences of ancient lives. A housecat evolved from the fifteen foot long ice tigers that stalked the frozen wastes, from the snarling black leopards that hunt the jungles. This or that fish evolved from something with staring eyes and snarling teeth that swam through primordial oceans. A dog was once a yellow-eyed wolf, with plumed tail arching over powerful haunches as it runs down a caribou three times its size, or perhaps descended from some spotted predator with wide, batlike ears that trotted over the oldest deserts. The wild roads were their roads first, and in some ways they still walk them. 

Within the highways the mage is both not himself and more himself. His wings measure nearly thirty feet from tip to tip, full of snow white and tawny cream and dark brown shadings. His eyes are golden and huge. His massive beak tapers to a razor point; his black talons could crush stone and steel or carry off stock animals if he so chose. His wingbeats are thunder in the airless, dimensionless, gray void of the wild road. The downsweep of his enormous wings is a gale in itself. 

The roc contents itself that this particular highway is untouched by darkness, as so few are these days. It opens its beak and cries its triumph, the shattering scream of a million years of successful avian predators. It sweeps gracefully away in satisfaction, winging back to the highway’s end and to its other, impossibly contracted life.

Humans, the mage thinks when he can think again. Traces of the other him still linger, muddling his brain and pouring unaccustomed predatory, base instincts through his nervous system. He has a brief but wild urge to eat a mouse. 

Humans. Humans are not meant for the wild roads. Humans like the Alchemist damn them with their touch. The legends spoke of the one eyed cat Majicou’s defeat, so long ago, at the hands of the human he loved. Before becoming the Majicou he had lived a life under the name Hobbe, and he had been the Alchemist’s cat.

How could a human save the wild roads?

The mage’s brain has no answers for that. The mage’s brain is still sluggish, his body full of pre-history; borrowed memories of flight, of hunting, of nesting and eggs and lonely mountain crags. 

Stop that, he tells the rest of himself. I’m a duck. Duck on a mission. I have to think. I have to concentrate. 

The rest of him says, sleep now. It registers night as a period of de-activation.

Sleep now.

But the boy—

Sleep now.

But the Keyblade—

_Sleep now._

And so he does.


End file.
